‘Ant-Man and the Wasp‘ Originally Had an Even Darker Ending

The following post contains SPOILERSfor Ant-Man and the Wasp. You better hurry up and see this movie soon if you want to be caught up before Avengers 4, my dudes. That’s coming up quick.

Although Ant-Man and the Wasp was largely spared the chaos wrought by Thanos and his universe-manipulating shenanigans in Avengers: Infinity War, his quest to erase half the known universe caught up with the tiniest Marvel heroes during their film’s post-credits scene. With the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, rescued, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) begin a new series of experiments into the true nature of the quantum realm, the smallest of the small. While Scott is doing a deep dive into said quantum realm, Thanos’ snap happens, wiping out half of everything. Menawhile, poor Scott is trapped down in the quantum realm. The end!

It’s a pretty bleak cliffhanger, but apparently it was originally going to be even bleaker than that. According to Evangeline Lilly (via ScreenRant), she and her Ant-Man co-stars filmed themselves dissolving into ash the way all the Avengers did when they died in Infinity War.

Eventually, director Peyton Reed decided to instead show only the aftermath of the characters dissolving, with Scott screaming for help with his friends and loved ones gone. Lilly says she firmly believes that was the correct choice, not because the movie was even darker that way, but because she thinks her “dusting” acting was not up to snuff:

I'm so grateful that they did cut that out. Because at that point I have not seen Avengers: Infinity War. So, I had really no idea what a dusting looked like, or felt like, or what's supposed to be, and I don't think Peyton [Reed] really did either. … Once I watched Avengers: Infinity War, I realized I dusted terribly. I did a really bad job of that. I had no idea really what was happening.

It is pretty hilarious that the secrecy around these movies is so tight that you can be called upon to act something that you don’t even understand. Like, how do you act like you’re fading away into nothingness if you don’t get to see Infinity War and copy what’s in there? That is seriously hard.